Interleaving in our AWS Training

Overview

What I’ve also been doing in the “Learning How to Learn” realm is used a technique called’ Interleaving‘ throughout the plan. Simply put, rather than trying to nail one area and move on, I’ve tried to set the study plan out so that you:

Get introduced to a topic.

Apply some core principles to understand the topic.

Get exposed to the principles in different contexts.

Test yourself on the essence of the lessons through spaced repetition.

So in term of what we’re trying to achieve I can explain as follows in the context of AWS Security.

AWS Security

Security is a big part of your required AWS expertise, but rather than try and learn every aspect of it once and then forget it, we want a way that builds on it, adding layers of nuance each time. This will be more effective in the long run with improving your understanding, because your brain will be challenged to assemble the information in multiple contexts.

If you apply more than one context, you can’t help but to understand more. If you’ve taken the time to understand more, you are far more likely to remember more, especially when you ‘top up’ what you learn with flashcards.

So how this applies to our AWS study:

Since security is a big part of AWS, we started by learning about IAM and roles. Then, we learned aspects of security as a byproduct of other tutorials (this way, you see ‘the role and meaning’ that security has in more than context). This is far more effective than learning a set of security services by rote. Finally, we revisit what we’ve learned across this course in today’s guide. And of course, all of that will we’ll recall at exam time, because we’ve used a spaced repetition system.